Maybe you wanted to retire from life for a couple of hours and read an intense and entertaining work, bouncy and ironic, full of compassion and elegance, that ends with a perfect plot resolution? Take "The Happy Hyena" by the dandy, cartoonist and great writer Max Beerboom. What happens in the novella: Lord Hell is a compulsive gambler, a dubious man and a womanizer who suddenly falls in love with a young dancer named Jenny, who seems to him a revelation. She comes into the world to save his soul. He doesn't think twice and proposes marriage to her. Jenny doesn't think twice and rejects him, because she wants to live with a man with the face of an angel. Lord Hell, desperate, orders an angel mask for himself and puts it on in order to deceive his lover. But it seems that the powers of the mask will surprise Lord Hell, who undergoes constant personal transformations. Thomas Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño fell in love with Beerboom's writing, and now it's our turn to read his stories as a kind of chamber work from the Italian Baroque, or as a poem that will delight us and resonate in our heads like an uplifting mantra.